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The Future Is History
- How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
- Narrated by: Masha Gessen
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
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Publisher's summary
Winner of the 2017 National Book Award in Nonfiction
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards
Winner of the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award
Named a Best Book of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, Paste, and Pop Sugar
The essential journalist and best-selling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.
Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own - as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.
Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Critic reviews
"Fascinating and deeply felt." (The New York Times Book Review)
“Forceful and eloquent on the history of her native country, Gessen is alarming and pessimistic about its future as it doubles down on totalitarianism.” (Los Angeles Times)
“A remarkable portrait of an ever-shifting era.... Gessen weaves her characters’ stories into a seamless, poignant whole. Her analysis of Putin’s malevolent administration is just as effective...a harrowing, compassionate and important book.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
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Great insight into changes in China
- By Paul on 04-14-09
By: Philip P. Pan
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The People's Republic of Amnesia
- Tiananmen Revisited
- By: Louisa Lim
- Narrated by: Louisa Lim
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In The People's Republic of Amnesia, NPR correspondent Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4 changed China, and how China changed the events of June 4 by rewriting its own history. Lim reveals new details about those fateful days, including how one of the country's most senior politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, as well as the inside story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square.
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great book and recording
- By Robert Peters on 06-14-16
By: Louisa Lim
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Notes on a Foreign Country
- An American Abroad in a Post-American World
- By: Suzy Hansen
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.
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A MUST-READ for all Truth-Seeking American wh
- By Parveen Mehdi-Newton on 12-08-17
By: Suzy Hansen
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Age of Ambition
- Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
- By: Evan Osnos
- Narrated by: Evan Osnos, George Backman
- Length: 16 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.
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Come back when you have a warrant!
- By Neuron on 11-06-15
By: Evan Osnos
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This Child Will Be Great
- Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President
- By: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The first elected woman president of an African country, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was also listed as one of the world’s 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes. This evocative memoir recounts Sirleaf ’s childhood upbringing and rise to political power in Liberia. More than a simple biography, Sirleaf ’s account details how she stood firm in the face of physical abuse early in life and carried that strength over into her career as a young economist in Samuel Doe’s regime.
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What a powerfully strong woman!
- By Gary on 10-18-11
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We Don't Know Ourselves
- A Personal History of Modern Ireland
- By: Fintan O'Toole
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society - perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism.
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Relentlessly Negative
- By John on 06-02-22
By: Fintan O'Toole
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The Assassins' Gate
- America in Iraq
- By: George Packer
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The Assassins' Gate, so dubbed by American soldiers, is the entrance to the American zone in the city of Baghdad. In 2003, the United States blazed into Iraq to depose dictator Saddam Hussein. But after three years and unknown thousands killed, that country faces an escalating civil war and an uncertain fate. How did it get to this point?
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Highly Recommended
- By Drapeau on 02-01-07
By: George Packer
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No Escape
- The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs
- By: Nury Turkel
- Narrated by: Stewart Lang
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful memoir by Nury Turkel lays bare China’s repression of the Uyghur people. Turkel is cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
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Powerfully Provocative
- By Amazon Customer on 06-01-22
By: Nury Turkel
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Goliath
- Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
- By: Max Blumenthal
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Goliath, New York Times best-selling author Max Blumenthal takes us on a journey through the badlands and high roads of Israel-Palestine, painting a startling portrait of Israeli society under the siege of increasingly authoritarian politics as the occupation of the Palestinians deepens. Beginning with the national elections carried out during Israel's war on Gaza in 2008/9, which brought into power the country's most right-wing government to date, Blumenthal tells the story of Israel in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo peace process.
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The truth is rarely pretty
- By William on 10-15-13
By: Max Blumenthal
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The Invitation-Only Zone
- The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project
- By: Robert S. Boynton
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, dozens of Japanese citizens were abducted from coastal Japanese towns by North Korean commandos. In what proved to be part of a global project, North Korea attempted to reeducate the abductees and train them to spy on the state's behalf. When the project faltered, the abductees were hidden in a series of guarded communities known as "Invitation-Only Zones" - the fiction being that these were exclusive enclaves, not prisons.
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Over enthusiastic reader!
- By AJW on 02-14-16
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The Italians
- By: John Hooper
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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John Hooper's marvelously entertaining and perceptive new book is ideal for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians. Looking at the facts that lie behind and often belie the stereotypes, his revealing book sheds new light on many aspects of Italian life: football and Freemasonry, sex, symbolism, and the reason Italian has twelve words for a coat hanger yet none for a hangover.
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Mi piace molto!
- By Adeliese Baumann on 12-30-16
By: John Hooper
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Trotsky in New York, 1917
- A Radical on the Eve of Revolution
- By: Kenneth D. Ackerman
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Lev Davidovich Trotsky burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as coleader of a Marxist Revolution seizing power in Russia. It made him one of the most recognized personalities of the 20th century, a global icon of radical change. Yet just months earlier, this same Lev Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small circle of fellow travelers. Where had he come from to topple Russia and change the world? Where else? New York.
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Great Story; Ludicrous Conclusion
- By Salvator Marinello on 12-03-20
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Worth the time
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The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag.
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a wonderful reminder never to forget
- By Privet on 05-25-19
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Where the Jews Aren't
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In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan. The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there.
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The Jewish World of Our Ancestors
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Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the glittering, surreal heart of 21st-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship far subtler than 20th century strains, that is rapidly rising to challenge the West.
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Loved it!
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Good But . . .
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a wonderful reminder never to forget
- By Privet on 05-25-19
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Hitler's True Believers
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Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Too often the theories underlying National Socialism or Nazism are dismissed as an irrational hodgepodge of ideas. Yet that ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and transformed him, however briefly, into the most powerful leader in the world.
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Fascinating listen
- By Amy Neff on 12-15-22
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All the Kremlin's Men
- Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin
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All the Kremlin's Men is a gripping narrative of an accidental king and a court out of control. Based on an unprecedented series of interviews with Vladimir Putin's inner circle, this book presents a radically different view of power and politics in Russia. The image of Putin as a strongman is dissolved. In its place is a weary figurehead buffeted - if not controlled - by the men who at once advise and deceive him. The regional governors and bureaucratic leaders are immovable objects, far more powerful in their fiefdoms than the president himself.
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Enough with the Russian accents!
- By Emma Jane Top on 12-17-17
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Words Will Break Cement
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The heroic story of Pussy Riot, who resurrected the power of truth in a society built on lies. On February 21, 2012, five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. In neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas, they performed a “punk prayer” beseeching the “Mother of God” to “get rid of Putin.” They were quickly shut down by security, and in the weeks and months that followed, three of the women were arrested and tried, and two were sentenced to a remote prison colony. But the incident captured international headlines, and footage of it went viral.
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Therapy in these authoritarian times
- By Emeri Burks on 08-30-22
By: Masha Gessen
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Putin's People
- How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe.
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Ultimate in nonfiction on Putinism.
- By Victoria Eriksson on 08-22-20
By: Catherine Belton
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This Is Not Propaganda
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, "behavioral change" salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia - but the answers he finds there are not what he expected.
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Shallow insights with a strong Leftist Bias
- By Larry on 09-22-19
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The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this book Satter tells the story of the apartment bombings and how Boris Yeltsin presided over the criminalization of Russia, why Vladimir Putin was chosen as his sucessor, and how Putin has suppressed all opposition while retaining the appearance of a pluralist state. As the threat represented by Russia becomes increasingly clear, Satter's description of where Russia is and how it got there will be of vital interest to anyone concerned about the dangers facing the world today.
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David understands Russia better than Russians do
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The Unwinding
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Overall
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Performance
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In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.
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Can't understand the low ratings!
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Midnight in Siberia
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Through the stories of fellow travelers, Greene explores the challenges and opportunities facing the new Russia: a nation that boasts open elections and newfound prosperity yet still continues to endure oppression, corruption, and stark inequality. Set against the wintery landscape of Siberia, Greene’s lively travel narrative offers a glimpse into the soul of 20th century Russia: how its people remember their history and look forward to the future.
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Long String of NPR Short Reports
- By Sara on 04-13-15
By: David Greene
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The Invention of Russia
- From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War
- By: Arkady Ostrovsky
- Narrated by: Michael Page
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The end of Communism and breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of euphoria around the world, but Russia today is violently anti-American and dangerously nationalistic. So how did we go from the promise of those days to the autocratic police state of Putin's new Russia? The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the Cold War to tell the story of the fight for the soul of a nation.
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Sad Story of Russia's Abandonment of Liberalism
- By Amazon Customer on 10-03-16
By: Arkady Ostrovsky
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Trotsky
- Downfall of a Revolutionary
- By: Bertrand M. Patenaude
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford University lecturer Bertrand M. Patenaude tells the dramatic story of Leon Trotsky's final years in exile in Mexico. Shedding new light on Trotsky's tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades become victims of the Great Terror, Trotsky: Downfall ofa Revolutionary brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history's most famous yet elusive figures.
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Good Trotsky Book, BAD conclusions at end
- By Darius on 02-09-15
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Stalin
- New Biography of a Dictator
- By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Nora Seligman Favorov - translator
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.
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Loved it, but wouldn't want to live it
- By Neil on 01-12-20
By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, and others
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The Return of the Russian Leviathan
- By: Sergei Medvedev
- Narrated by: Christopher Douyard
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Russia's relationship with its neighbors and with the West has worsened dramatically in recent years. Under Vladimir Putin's leadership, the country has annexed Crimea, begun a war in Eastern Ukraine, used chemical weapons on the streets of the UK, and created an army of Internet trolls to meddle in the US presidential elections. How can we understand this apparent relapse into aggressive imperialism and militarism?
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Interesting book!
- By Shira Medoff on 07-21-23
By: Sergei Medvedev
What listeners say about The Future Is History
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- James Messelbeck
- 04-10-18
My study of Russia was incomplete until this book
Learned much of current double-think attitudes of Russian people today and why it will take generations to erode its seductive qualities
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- Kevin
- 11-01-18
Absolutely brilliant
The best book I listened to all year. Not only is Masha Gessen a talented reporter, she is also a top notch political theorist. Her philosophical analysis and historical insight are coupled with the incredible true stories of real Russian citizens. Her narration is also well done and a delight to listen to. You won't be disappointed
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-06-19
More From a Great Russia Scholar and Storyteller
Answers so many questions about modern Russia and
paints the context picture in wonderful detail.
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- Mitchell
- 08-21-18
Great Insight Into Modern Russia
Great listen; highly recommended insight into the modern state of Russian politics and society. It's quite troubling, to say the least.
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- caspar
- 12-13-23
Great, but hard to follow for a novice
Going myself struggling to keep up. Well written and super interesting, though tough read for someone like me who isn't well versed in either Russian history or sociology
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- Margot
- 02-18-18
If you can keep the characters straight...
This book was not only a valuable insight into the government and people of Russia in the present-day, but also a deep philosophical exploration of what totalitarianism is and means, how it happens, and how over time a regime can systematically go about exterminating those with the will and means to resist them. This is a MUST read for anyone who wants to understand post-USSR Russia. I wish there was a book like this one for every country in the world.
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28 people found this helpful
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- Maksim Haphizov
- 02-05-19
Really, there is no future for us as a nation
Astonishing experience. That's all I can say.
I was talking part in the interest of 2011-2012 which Masha had put so much attention to in book. I remember how much I was passed off with the absolutely unnecessary, but enormous manipulation of the voting in November 2011. And then I had realized that majority of people who surround me just love it...
Great writing and performance. But realization that future is history makes me cry.
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- roark Burney
- 02-05-18
Hard to hear driving down the highway
Masha’s timber is hard to hear on cellphone speakers while I’m driving. This feels like a bad reason to not listen to something but I know you’re commuting too. Great writing, would listen to and question all hope again.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-12-21
Absolutely fascinating
Fascinating insider views of the evolution of Russia after Glastnost. The author is obviously not a professional voice actress, but I rather like her reading anyway because it is her story to tell
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- Josie B.
- 05-12-22
Want to understand Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Listen to this book. Informative, insightful and troubling. The second half reads like the GOP playbook for America. Can be hard to follow the various Russian names at times; but overall essential listening for anyone who wants to understand Putin and the Russian mindset.
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